Servanne Woodward Bücher

This informative and thought-provocating book gives an intimate portrait of two major 18th-century French philosophers famous for their influence over modern aesthetics. Their personal reflexions on art, beauty and inventive genius are vividly presented in the context of Parisian artistic institutions during the reigns of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. The book offers a refreshing perspective into the pre-Revolutionary movement of the Enlightenment promoted by Diderot and the pre-Romantic sensibility modelled by Rousseau. This look back into the 18th century is very suggestive in regards to the current philosophies of art and may raise new answers to old questions.

Baroque novels focus on the psychology of love, while love in the context of nature is the subject of the pastoral genre. Introducing animals to such texts proves unexpectedly challenging. The inclusion of pets in the artistic representation involves a reversal of scale and various modes of comedy, including socio-political satire. At a time when some writers fantasize that children can be born of a human-animal couple, or question the degree of free will and physiological determinism influencing human or animal actions, scientific and philosophical enquiries threaten to reduce the whole animated world to a physiology akin to one of automatons. It is a criticism levied by the sentimentaires against the libertines. Eventually, the study must be initiated with the monitoring of the modulated and variable conceptions of the persons constituting a «couple» and the status of the «pet».